4/22/2010 @ 11:20AM

Obama Fights Goldman With Social Media

In 2008 candidate Barack Obama and his communications team rewrote the online playbook for presidential campaigns. In the two years since, Team Obama’s affinity for social and digital media engagement hasn’t waned a bit. In just the latest example of its new media savvy, the administration is taking its populist messaging about the need for financial reform to the digital space this week, highlighting Securities and Exchange Commission’s charges against
Goldman Sachs
as evidence of “the consequences of what happens when there’s too little accountability on Wall Street and too little protection for Main Street,” in the president’s words.

The strategy of going after Wall Street may seem obvious in a midterm election year dominated by economic concerns, but the tactics being deployed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. are anything but–especially for issue advocates and corporate reputation managers, who have yet to fully embrace what our president and his aides learned some time ago, that the Internet is now the strategic high ground of the political battlefield, and that therefore whoever controls it controls the debate.

For a peak behind the curtain at the White House’s efforts to focus voter frustration on Wall Street’s woes, you need only turn to
Google
, where the administration has unleashed a multi-week search engine marketing (SEM) campaign designed to funnel information seekers to the “Organizing for America” website. That site is the former organizational hub for the famously successful “mybarackobama.com” campaign, which many credit with propelling the candidate’s meteoric rise to win the presidency.

For much of the last month, Obama’s digital team has engaged in a paid advertising effort that targets a variety of key search terms–such as “Goldman SEC”–on the leading search engine, and it has integrated that paid SEM initiative with numerous online campaign tactics. In fact, given the millions of online relationships the Obama administration established during the campaign, the White House’s “earned” social media efforts might just outpace its paid efforts on Google.

Coordinated pushes to the president’s more than 8 million followers on Facebook are urging the faithful to “ensure that taxpayers will never again be forced to bail out big banks.” President Obama’s verified Twitter profile has joined the rallying cry as well, calling on more than 3 million followers to “hold the big banks accountable to the people they serve.” All the while, the White House is leveraging the viral nature of these platforms to turn its true believers into digital-messaging echo chambers that can potentially grow its base of support exponentially.

With nearly every age, race and ethnic voter demographic migrating its news gathering habits to the online marketplace, issue advocates and corporate reputation managers must be prepared for the new messaging paradigm that now drives the news cycle and ultimately determines winners and losers in the court of public opinion.

As Wall Street’s most profitable company in history has learned over the past week, almost every news development today can be made to support advocacy efforts in the online political arena, when leveraged effectively. Goldman’s challenge is to begin to aggressively engage the online community and tell a persuasive story of transparency and accountability via digital and social media. To date, Goldman’s silence in the online space has been deafening–making it all the easier for regulators, legislators and the White House to paint a bull’s eye on its back.

For opponents of the president’s financial reforms and those who hope to reverse his electoral success in 2008, however, a far greater challenge awaits. First, they must realize just how far they have already fallen behind by failing to exploit the organizational and messaging advantages that reside online. And second, they must realize that just as with the financial reform package now winding its way through Washington, political debates in the future will largely be settled before the legislation has even been written, and well before voters head to the polls.

Dallas Lawrence is the chair of the social and digital media practice for Levick Strategic Communications. He served for five years as a member of the Bush administration’s communications team. You can connect with him on Twitter at @dallaslawrence.